Time for some hum drum... 8-16 February

Well things have basically quietened down for us now. We have settled into our respective roles at the hotel, Maria doing all the work, and me chatting to customers at the bar, and a routine is starting to emerge. We have two days off every week and those two days are now allegedly Wednesday and Thursday. We therefore plan to use these days to see what’s around the southern part of England.

The week was dominated with work as the roster changed such that we worked from Wednesday through till Tuesday. As a result of the renovations currently being done on the hotel, the power and hot water have been on and off in different parts of the hotel over the past week, and we have had workmen in the roof removing asbestos as well. The result is that various parts of the hotel have been off limits, including the laundry. We had to spend a night in one of the guest rooms (don’t all offer your condolences at once), as there is some weird pulsing noise in our bedroom stopping us from sleeping, and nobody can work out where its coming from.

Our only real excursion this week was yesterday, Thursday 16th. One of the hassles we have had starting work is getting a national insurance number (kind of like a tax file number and Medicare number rolled into one.) The boss told us to ring the Eastbourne office of social security, but it is almost impossible to get through. Either the line is engaged, or it just rings forever. We decided to give up ringing them and see what happened if we just turned up. At the last minute Maria decided to try them one last time before we left to at least get directions to the office. She miraculously managed to talk to a person, and found that we shouldn’t be going to the Eastbourne office from Wych Cross, we should be going to the Woking office. So he gave us the number of the Woking office and Maria tried to call them whilst I looked up Woking on our map. Maria failed to get onto Woking, which was a good thing as I found that Woking is in fact in Surrey, about 5 miles north of Guildford. Suffice it to say that we weren’t going to find it very easy to get to Woking on public transport. So Maria tried the Brighton office instead. When Maria rang the Brighton office, she got the same person answering the phone as when she had rung the Eastbourne office. So this seemingly omnipresent voice on the other end of the phone (the telecomnicon?) arranged a 3:10pm meeting for us at Brighton.

Armed with a stack of ID and some jaffa cakes, we found a transport solution that only required one bus and one train to get us to Brighton in about half an hour, and off we trudged for a day at the beach.

Brighton is demographically quite different from anywhere else I have been in the UK thus far. It is very much a university town, and university towns always have a certain feel about them. We took a stroll from the railway station down toward the beach, taking a quick diversion to make sure we knew where the social securities office was before going to the pier.

Apparently ‘beach’ has quite a different definition here. I can understand now why Churchill said ‘We will fight them on the beaches’. Anyone invading Brighton beach would become so depressed they would turn around and go home before they could reach for the Prozac. Brighton beach was cold, rocky, grey and horrible. On a serious note though, it suited me far more than the bright sun and sand of an Australian beach. ‘Why?’ you may ask. I need no justification for avoiding it! A quick walk down the pier, a few snaps with the camera, and into the fish and chip shop for lunch.

That was a mistake. Fish was evident, as were chips. One merely had to fight through two inches of solid batter to reach them. Ordering the large cod and large haddock was also a misjudgement. Indeed these fish must be man eaters in the wild. The fish were quite tasty, under all that batter, but Englishmen merely give you a look of blank incomprehension when you ask whether you can have fish without batter. Apparently they pull them out of the sea battered. Oh well.

Once we found the relative safety of the inside of the fish and chip shop, the sun mocked us by breaking through the clouds. I haven’t worn my sunglasses since we arrived in the UK, but I could have used them then.

After some brief shopping, we had our appointment at the social securities office. The staff there have quite a harried look about them, and become very friendly and helpful when they find that you aren’t a pregnant, teenage junky wanting to yell or cry at them. We should have our number in four to six weeks, and then the formalities of working in England are over for the time being.

We caught the train/bus home and that was our big day out for the week.

Take care

Fletch’s tips for new travellers

The most popular beer here seems to be Fosters. Nobody has yet been able to tell me why…